My 10 least favorite metal albums of 2017

I’ll admit, I do love making lists and quantifying things like this, I’m a sucker. I know that’s the exact opposite of what I say in this blog’s description, but when it’s easy enough to just put down 10 albums I really didn’t like this year, the math wasn’t that hard, though the few re-listens I gave these albums sure were.

This should go without saying, but this is no objective declaration of the WORST music to come out this year. I’m sure there is plenty that I didn’t hear this year that would end up here if I had. I’m also just talking about metal albums, so that makes it easier too.

10. Overkill – The Grinding Wheel

I’ve never really been much of an Overkill fan, but The Grinding Wheel is so unoriginal and unexciting. I don’t know how it got such high marks from some critics. The album could be dismembered and scattered across their discography and it wouldn’t even be noticeable. At best it had some solid thrash moments with that AC/DC-ish flair, but more often than not it was dragging and even annoying.

9. Cradle of Filth – Cryptoriana - The Seductiveness of Decay

The listening pain induced on me by these album goes up by an order of magnitude here. Dani Filth just made such an absurdly tasteless album this time around, not tasteless with gross lyrics or offensive imagery, but with obnoxious and uninspired writing. This album was so hard for me to give repeated listens to, and it has all the ingredients to make a more respectable Cradle of Filth album, it’s just so messily and gaudily put together it’s impossible to not nod off to.

8. Suicide Silence – Suicide Silence

I would argue this one was the most notorious on this list, and I’m sure plenty of other people are naming the “worst” album of the year, and I can’t disagree with them on it being worth lampooning. The stylistic direction they chose to take the album in made so little sense in the context of their career (which was at first exciting), but they just did not seem to know to do it when pen hit the music paper. What they touted like some big avant garde artistic decision for them ended up as cheap, confusing Deftones/Korn mimicry. I don’t deny that they did what they truly felt most compelled to do, I mean I can’t imagine anyone pressuring them to do this instead of another deathcore album, but it just came off like such a campy tribute of sorts to their musical heroes. They’re pretty dead now, but we got some decent memes from this album at least. Boy did those memes sure get to Suicide Silence when they started though.

7. Seether – Poison the Parish

They’ve got a handful of songs sprinkled throughout their discography that I like, but Seether have never been a really stellar group to me. They’ve seemed capable though, but not really this time. This is certainly their most recycled, effortless effort so far. I can’t recall many musical memories from this album, but I know the album just kept drifting off into the distance and never made me want to go catch it.

6. Dragonforce – Reaching into Infinity

This one was saddening because I’ve always stuck up for Dragonforce, who I don’t believe to be so deserving of all the mockery they get and the constant bringing up of Guitar Hero when their name is mentioned. But this album was almost a caricature of their own work, and not one that I wanted to keep looking at. Reaching into Infinity just plays into all the power metal clichés Dragonforce has cultivated around their name and the blandness of the delivery is the opposite of powerful. This album, like Seether’s, just floated off into the sky, not beckoning me to follow it, so far away.

5. Six Feet Under – Torment

I mean, I knew it wasn’t going to be top notch death metal, but I gave it a fraction of an ounce of hope with my listen, which was utterly wasted on Torment. Chris Barnes’ voice has not improved and it remains just a smear of crap across the only occasionally exciting but mostly by-the-numbers death metal instrumentals behind him.

4. Prophets of Rage – Prophets of Rage

Even just writing more about this album is not something I want to be doing again. The pathetic pandering with hollow, surface-level opinionating for what just seems like a few bucks ironically milked from the legacy of Rage Against the Machine left such a sour taste in my mouth. Who is this even supposed to be for, inattentive Rage fans? That’s the only thing I can think of because it’s not making any kind of bold or emotionally embodied statements. It’s not trying to make any real cultural impact, even though it wants to act like it is and Tom Morello wants to feel important for it. And this is without even mentioning the music backing this stupid nostalgia project. The Rage Against the Machine members did such an awfully gutless impersonation of themselves, it just highlights how over the hill they are. I have reserved the word for just one album this year so as not to overuse it, and Prophets of Rage earned it; this album is cringy.

3. Ded – Mis-An-Thrope

Though I had the impression that it had, this album didn’t make too many waves, and for good reason. What I heard being hyped as a triumphant kick back of nu metal (a genre whose style and some of whose major names I will wholeheartedly defend) into the current metal ecosystem was instead mostly full of the type of Slipknot impersonating I would have expected a decade or so ago interspersed with the type of emasculating good cop contrast that completely negates whatever rage it’s paired with that made a lot of alternative metal look like shit in the 90’s and early 2000’s.

2. Asking Alexandria – Asking Alexandria

This album is practically tied for the number one spot on this list for the degree of disgust I felt for it. It being a shorter is probably the only thing keeping at number two. This album is a bag of recyclables filled to the point of ripping some holes in the bag, that someone forgot was supposed to be recyclables and mindlessly threw rank-ass old food into as well. How something this watered down and pandering is one of metal’s best sellers is embarrassing. The cheesy, cliché applications of half-assed metalcore and cheap electronic backings over a way-too-sparkly-clean mix and mastering just make this thing reek of focus-group sales engineering. Like any bag of trash, I just want to get rid of it and not have to think about it anymore.

1. Hollywood Undead – Five

I only heard this as the result of an impulse of morbid curiosity that I have since hit myself in the head for giving into. Start to finish, and with almost no redeeming deviations, Hollywood Undead’s fifth album too many is a disaster of bro-y masculine bravado (also cancelled out by the littering of shitty, wimpy clean vocals), tasteless and dated Eminem-copy-catting rap verses about how “hard” they are (…), and pathetically unoriginal and failed intimidations directed at the group’s “haters”. After just about every song along the way I just wanted so badly to quit listening to it, held back only by a desire to give it a fair shot. This one is another album I can’t figure out who it’s for. The band might fire back the typical trope that they made this album for themselves, in which case, they would have no reason to be complaining about “haters” so much. I had thought the band had fallen off the face of the Earth after their second album or so, and hearing a FIFTH album from them getting promotion and publicity made me lose a little faith in humanity. I don’t want to write anymore about this album, it’s just going to make me more frustrated. I’m done. I’m ready to let my memory of this album and the others in this post fade farther and farther away.